A Toronto staff report gives four options for achieving the reduction, but many councillors are loath to give up revenue the city has come to rely on.

Mayor Rob Ford’s skeptical executive committee will next week consider his proposal to cut the land transfer tax by 10 per cent.

Ford campaigned on a popular pledge to eliminate the tax on home purchases, but council and government officials do not believe the city could afford to lose so much revenue — $345 million last year. Even his attempt to reduce the tax by one-tenth faces resistance on the executive.

“I’d like to see a list of programs that that would affect,” said Councillor Paul Ainslie. “We work on such a thin edge on our budget that anything we do now seems to have a huge impact somewhere. (The tax) is something I certainly didn’t vote for in the beginning, but it passed, it’s here, and we need to be financially prudent when we’re looking at reducing a revenue tool by 10 per cent.”

A new city report to Ford’s executive offers four options for achieving a 10 per cent cut.

In one scenario, the first $55,000 of a home purchase would be tax-free rather than taxed at 0.5 per cent; the next $195,000 would be taxed at 0.1 per cent rather than the current 1 per cent.

In another scenario, the first $250,000 would be tax-free, and the next $150,000 would be reduced to 0.7 per cent from the current 1 per cent, but the rebate for first-time buyers would be eliminated to make up some of the lost revenue.

It would also force the city to find a way to plug an estimated $34 million budget hole. Revenue from the tax has grown every year.

“The growth in (land transfer tax) revenue has helped allow property tax increases to stay low, and has supported key fiscal strategies” such as avoiding new debt, city manager Joe Pennachetti says in the report. Pennachetti also says “staff are hesitant” to lower the tax rate before considering the potential impact on programs.

Pennachetti recommends only that the committee forward the report to the budget committee for consideration during the 2014 budget process.

Toronto is the only city in Ontario with its own municipal land transfer tax. The province’s 2006 City of Toronto Act gave the city the power to impose that tax, the billboard tax, and the vehicle tax that council scrapped at Ford’s urging in 2010.

The provincial law also authorized road tolls and municipal taxes on alcohol, cigarettes and live entertainment. It prohibited municipal taxes on income, wealth, gasoline, sales and hotel rooms.

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